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Using your genes to predict if you will respond to Rheumatoid arthritis therapy. (not available in Dubai, UAE at this time)

The ORBIT data “showed that patients who have seropositive rheumatoid arthritis are just as likely to respond to rituximab therapy when compared to anti-TNF therapy,” said Duncan Porter, MD, Honorary Associate Professor and a consultant rheumatologist at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland, and one of the lead authors of the study. “However, a significant proportion of patients failed to respond to their first biologic drug, but responded when they were switched to the alternative. If we could identify markers in the blood that predicted which drug patients were most likely to respond to, that would allow us to choose the best treatment for that patient at the start, rather than rely on a trial-and-error approach.”
Dr. Porter and his fellow researchers sequenced the RNA from the peripheral blood of 241 RA patients recruited for the ORBIT study, after first depleting ribosomal and globin RNA. They used 70 percent of the samples to develop response prediction models, and reserved 30 percent for validation. Clinical response to the therapies was defined as a drop in DAS28-ESR (disease activity score) of 1.2 units between the baseline and at three months. They used multiple machine learning tools to predict general responsiveness and differential responses to TNFi and rituximab. They also used tenfold cross validation to train the models for responsiveness, and then tested these on the validation samples as well.
– See more at: http://www.rheumatology.org/About-Us/Newsroom/Press-Releases/ID/780/Three-Gene-Sets-Could-Predict-Response-to-Rheumatoid-Arthritis-Therapies?elq_mid=13657&elq_cid=4300796#sthash.JBGEjU1y.dpuf